Impartido por:

Loudon Stearns

Assistant Professor

Transcripción

Another major consideration when choosing a microphone is the microphone's polar pattern. And the polar pattern is describing what area it picks up well, and what area around the microphone it projects from. And let's look at the Shure SM58 here first. Now, this is designed to be used on stage for a vocalist. And we talked about earlier, the idea of having the monitor right in front of you. It's very loud. And pred, and sending out the signal that this microphone is capturing. So, this microphone is designed to be held on, in the hand. To pick up well from this side of the microphone and reject sound from the other side. Now, so, the polar pattern is describing the area around the microphone that it's picking up well. And this microphone has what we call a cartiod or directional polar pattern. And a cartiod, if you look at the polar pattern kind of diagram of it, it looks kind of heart shaped, in that you see it doesn't pick up well here and it picks up well kind of all around it. And that's designed specifically because it doesn't want to pick up the monitors and what's behind it. A directional microphone like this will give you a more focused sound, and will kind of isolate a sound within the mix, because it's pointed right at it. Now, dynamic microph, microphones and condenser microphones, they can both be directional and they can both have a variety of different polar patterns. So, Shure SM58, standard kind of stage microphone, directional cardioid pattern, and directional microphones are really, really very useful. But we do have a wide variety of other polar patterns. Another very common one is omnidirectional. Meaning that it picks up from all angles equally well. there's other polar patterns called figure eight, which picks up from the front and the back of the microphone. And there are also flavors of kind of the directional mic. so, a cardioid microphone also has supercardioid and hypercardiod, and there just kind of flavors of directional, and maybe bring in a little bit outside of that directional space. Which just helps give you a bit more of the sound of the room. Now, when choosing a polar pattern, you always want to remember that every time you record something, your recording val element within that space. And the choice of a polar pattern is rally going to be a major, have a major impact on how much of the space or the room that your actually, actually capturing. A cardioid directional microphone is going to have a focus sound in a focused recording that doesn't include much of the room. But something that's omnidirectional can include a large, a much more of the space that you're in. So, you have to consider, do I want to capture the sound of the space, or am I trying to capture the sound of that instrument specifically. Now, this AKG microphone, which is kind of nice has the option to select different polar patterns. and we can choose between omnidirectional and cardiod, and figure eight with the switch that's right in front of it. Which is really nice to let you kind of have that option. And more expensive condenser mics will have that option. You do want to notice also, that as you change the polar pattern in a microphone like this, the frequency response also changes. They're kind of interrelated in a way. So, you might even change the, the polar pattern to change the kind of frequency reponse. Or the EQ that that microphone is imposing on the signal.